Many call it a Palestinian film, but it remains controversial as it has prompted concerns and conflicts among Arab audiences. Many have shared extensive posts explaining why the film won an Oscar for best documentary, arguing that the award is purely to polish Israel’s global image in the wake of the genocide.
The controversy around the film involves the fact that it features an Israeli director and an Israeli producer and its funding came from an Israeli entity long boycotted. It had been pulled out of Palestinian and Arab film festivals for those reasons. It is also arguably designed to appease the West while offering nothing of substance to the Arab side.
For Arabs, Palestinian cinema has often managed to make an impact through subtle details involving no violence as such. A kind of tragic satire comes through in the work of Elia Suleiman, for example, with landmark films like Divine Intervention (2002). Iconic figures who came at the Palestinian issue in movingly subtle ways include Mohammad Bakri, Hany Abu-Assad, Rashid Masharawi and Carol Mansour, the latter mostly known for her documentaries including Aida Returns, tracing the journey back to her mother’s hometown to bury her.
A younger generation like Tarzan and Arab Nasser, the twin brothers’ known for their masterpiece Gaza Mon Amour, Farah Nabulsi known for The Teacher and Amer Shomali known for his 2014 documentary The Wanted 18 – presenting the efforts of his Palestinian hometown Beit Sahour to start their independent dairy production operation with 18 cows during the first Intifada – are equally delicate. The same might be said of remarkable short films like a Baad (Upshot), directed by Maha Haj and Thank You for Banking with Us, directed by Laila Abbas, both released in 2024.
But as for the present 92-minute documentary, which takes the form of amateur video footage by young Palestinian activist Basel Adra, a former law student who began filming the Israeli occupation of his village of Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank at the age of 15 and has been fighting against forced displacement of his people, it documents the slow destruction of Palestinian lives, with Israeli soldiers demolishing homes and evicting families after transforming Masafer Yatta into a military training area, making it illegal to live in.
Amid this turmoil, Basel forms an unusual friendship with Yuval, an Israeli journalist supposedly supporting his cause. Their bond deepens as they navigate their strikingly different realities. The film is formed of chapters with dates, and the shooting starts in 2019.
The film doesn’t add to what had already been said and known whether in the news or in Palestinian cinema – which has already presented more coherent and comprehensive human stories – though one resident of Masafar Yatta makes a powerful statement when he addresses Yuval: “My whole life, I just wanted a home. Whenever I have a home, it’s demolished and then I begin the journey of building a new home. This is not a life.”
While tanks are constantly present in the area and bulldozers loom on the horizon, residents are wondering whose turn it is this time, which house is about to be torn down and which family is about to become homeless. Another frustrated Palestinian states that his ancestors had lived there since the 1830s. On the other hand, Basel remembers his father’s arrest at a protest and the former British prime minister Tony Blair’s visit to the village, when he was asked to stop the demolitions and the Israeli government promised they wouldn’t tear down homes in that particular area following his intervention.
There is a recurring scene featuring the small petrol station owned by Basel’s father, the only place with lights in the darkness of the village as it is a gathering point, as well as recurrent shots of signs showing fuel and diesel prices, as if they are the only signs of life. Meanwhile, the film relies on subtle messages from the Israeli journalist, who seems to treat Palestinians and Israelis equally suggesting a two-sides perspective. In reality, of course, Palestinians are the rightful owners of the land, while the Israeli occupiers are continually pushing them out and demolishing their homes.
During one of the protests against demolishing a house in the village, Basel’s brother is shot, and throughout the documentary we see him paralysed as a result; he sleeps on a small mattress on the floor where his desperate mother sometimes allows journalists to see him even though he doesn’t want them to.
On the one hand, Basel is glued to his phone screen, addicted to posting pictures and videos on social media uncovering the horrors of the occupation in his village. On the other hand, Yuval is disappointed by the low number of readers of his articles on Masafer Yatta, and when he expresses this sentiment to Basel, the latter dismisses the importance of those articles. With this brief conversation the film shows the difference between Basel and Yuval’s situations, as Yuval can travel around freely while Basel is locked up in the village.
No Other Land is co-directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor, and it won a best documentary award at the Berlin International Film Festival, at the London Critics Circle Film Awards and the Athens International Film Festival, among others.
At the end of the film it is announced that the documentary was completed just before 7 October 2023 and that Basel’s cousin was shot by settlers on 13 October 2023; similar attacks have led to the residents of Masafer Yatta leaving en masse. What remains unclear is why Yuval’s presence was necessary.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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